A35. Check the Business Case and evaluate the benefits

This activity is part of the Post-Project section. Post-Project activities are done by the Sponsor, after the project is finished, when there's no program or portfolio management system to carry on the responsibility. The goal is to keep tracking the benefits of the project.Post-Project activities repeat every 6 months, for 2 to 5 years (depending on the project).

The Sponsor spends a few hours measuring the benefits realized from the project, or asks someone else to do so (in which case, the Sponsor stays accountable).

The expected benefits, and the way they are supposed to be measures are described in the Business Case.

If measuring benefits is not practical, well-designed KPIs based on outcomes can be used instead. If there’s a product and you make changes on it with multiple projects, it might be difficult to say how extra benefits are related to each new feature; in that case, you can only measure and report it in aggregate.

Examples

A project for building a villa for an external customer: besides the money we earn by delivering the project, when the happy customer refers a new one to us after a year, it can be considered a generated benefit.

An internal project for preparing a well-formed website for our restaurant: there can be a simple electronic questionnaire given to the customer at the end, asking how they have heard about us. One of the choices would be “I saw your website and became interested”. This can be used to measure how many new customers are coming to our restaurant because of the product of the project, and how much money we’ve generated.

A large construction project: 10% of our invoices used to be deposited as a performance guarantee. After a year, 95% of this money is released, and can be considered a benefit. Note: in cases such as this, make sure you’re not double counting the money.

A project for designing a new equipment: after three years, we had a new customer asking for a similar design. Having the existing design, our effort was reduced by 35%, which generated about 35% more benefit in the new project.

We are a hosting provider and had a project to add an advanced ticketing system to our support system: a well-known blogger has published a post about top 20 hosts, and we’re among them because he has found our ticketing system a significant advantage. This article has generated a certain number of new customers for us, which is equal to a certain amount of benefit.